Building Traffic for Your Blog - Part 1

Although I’ve set up this blog in December 2007, the actual blogging started about one month ago. That’s when I started to write more often, to set up plugins and make all kinds of tweaks to this blog, to interact with other bloggers, to promote my blog on forums and social networks, etc.

I will use March 1st 2007 as reference and I will write a post like this one at the beginning of each month (first day of the month if possible). I will post information about this blog’s traffic and the methods used to bring more traffic. My plan is to reach and most importantly keep an average of 500 visitors /day in the next 3 months. But hey, I won’t be upset if this happens sooner.

Below is a screenshot from Google Analytics with traffic stats from March 1st to April 1st. And no, that sudden increase is not an April’s Fool joke. It’s not Photoshop.

As you can see from this graph, there was a spike in traffic on March 13, generated by the fact that one of my articles was posted on StumbleUpon. That’s when I reached 273 visits. Apart from that, there were no major events. Still, the traffic levels increased from 10-15 Visits in February to about 50 Visits in March, so I guess that’s pretty good news.

That abrupt increase in traffic from the last couple of days is due to the fact that I have been receiving some traffic from various sources:

• My blog was featured on We Love WP, a CSS gallery showcasing Wordpress powered sites.
• There was also a lot of traffic coming from social bookmarking sites. The most popular articles were Top 5 Projects You Should Run Away From and the two Wordpress tutorials that I wrote recently: Customizing Widgets Using CSS and Adding Rounded Corners to Widgets Using CSS.

On April 1st this blog had 249 Visits. I know that from this graphic it looks as though traffic really took off, but I will have to disappoint you: after April 1st, traffic levels didn’t continue to rise above the record of 273 Visits / day. But there is some good news: traffic didn’t fall all the way down to 50 Visits, but is steady at about 75 Visits / day.

And now it’s time to draw some conclusions:

• Work on your SEO and how you can bring more traffic from search engines. I know I have to: search engine traffic accounts for only 11% of the traffic I received in March. This is way, way too little, but the good news is there’s a lot of room for growth.
• The occasional wave of social networking traffic will make you popular, but only for a while. You will soon find out that you can’t ride the wave for too long. You just have know how to take advantage of your 10 minutes of fame.
• Building traffic for your blog is not an easy thing to do and it doesn’t happen over night. Like with every other thing in life, you have to put some hours of work into it, before you can see some real results.

I’ll be back on May 1st with Part 2 of this article.